If you see one of your team mates driving a Goliath all alone you should better linkgun-heal it than taking the machine gun seatUsually you wont do much with that weapon so its often better to just try to keep that tank alive (IMHO)

Yeah I agree. Usually I go with the machine gun only when there is a need to attack targets unreachable for the main cannon (footers behind a hill, flyers...), when there is a need to do high dps combined with the main cannon (attacking nodes and levs), or when the fight involves target that are already (or are very likely to soon become) wounded (which is the case with many fight that involves a lot of actors, like on some TripleSlap skirmishes).

Against a Manta, maybe it's usually better to assist the tank on foot and just go with the Avril / SR.

One another thing:

it seems that some people doesn't know that the secondary fire of the Cicada rear gun exists to *deflect incoming Avril rockets*. (*cough cough anik cough cough* )So, when the main driver have a gunner, he usually expects to not have to worry about them, since the gunner can easily defend the vehicle against them.

With some practice, even a solo pilot can learn to quickly switch between the two seats just to deflect the Avrils, without losing too much speed (the bots actually do this, at least on Godlike). It's tricky, but it's doable.

However, it seems that it cannot deflect air to air missiles from the Raptor, but I'm not sure (can someone please confirm this?)

Correct. AVRiL rockets are specially coded to be distracted by Cicada decoys. All other seeking rockets (RL, Raptor, Leviathan, etc.) just ignore them. As long as you're only dealing with AVRiL attacks and you lack a gunner, you can quickly switch seats to drop a decoy and quickly switch back to the pilot seat to keep moving.Interesting side fact: If a high-skill bot pilots a Cicada and doesn't have a gunner, it may "reach over" to the gunner seat's decoy trigger to defend itself against incoming AVRiL rockets. The chance of that happening increases with game difficulty and reaches 100% at Godlike game difficulty. If the gunner seat is occupied with a Bot, it will defend against incoming AVRiLs with 100% chance at Inhuman skill level already.

Wormbo wrote:Correct. AVRiL rockets are specially coded to be distracted by Cicada decoys. All other seeking rockets (RL, Raptor, Leviathan, etc.) just ignore them. As long as you're only dealing with AVRiL attacks and you lack a gunner, you can quickly switch seats to drop a decoy and quickly switch back to the pilot seat to keep moving.Interesting side fact: If a high-skill bot pilots a Cicada and doesn't have a gunner, it may "reach over" to the gunner seat's decoy trigger to defend itself against incoming AVRiL rockets. The chance of that happening increases with game difficulty and reaches 100% at Godlike game difficulty. If the gunner seat is occupied with a Bot, it will defend against incoming AVRiLs with 100% chance at Inhuman skill level already.

I never understood the concept of the Cicada decoy working against Avrils. When they designed this game they got totally confused! I can see how a decoy could work against what is called a "fire and forget" weapon such as a missile from a Raptor, but it should NOT decoy an Avril as this is an optically guided weapon, where guidance is from the person who launches it from the ground. The guy firing the Avril will not even see the decoy, so how would they be distracted by it? Grrr [/endrant]

Yup, they got it mixed up. Incoming AVRiLs even show up as "heatseekers" in the lock warning text, but as we learn in UT3, the AVRiL actually uses a laser to paint the target for its rockets. The Raptor rockets are probably heat-seekers instead. Not sure about Rocket Launcher and Leviathan rockets. You can't really call them radar-guided, as they don't care if the target temporarily hides behind something.

We were talking from a technical point of view. Gameplay-wise you are right, of course. (But we're getting off-topic here...)

Always heal your power nodes, even if they are currently not attackable by the enemy team. You will not only score points for doing so, but it is also always possible that the enemy may reach the node despite the current game state.

Still I see some ppl jumping and standing on the side parts of the manta and drop off it, if the manta starts moving/jumpingYou should always be standing on the top of the manta (not on the sides parts). Crouching also helps to decrease the chance of dropping off it seems.

Here comes another thing into my mind:If you stand on top of a manta and you want to fire an AVRIL rocket (or spider mines for example), you should not aim in the direction the manta is moving.It happened to me sometimes that I got killed by my own rocket (spider mine) in such cases.To avoid that you should always aim to the side (or backwards)

And yet another one ^^:If one spider mine is crawling after you, you can prevent the damage by pulling out your shield gun.You should aim a little to the ground with your shield gun AND its best to stand still in that moment that spider mine hits you.If you aim straight in front of you or you keep moving (especially in the direction of the mine), there is a chance of taking splash damage.If you are followed by more than one spider mine its often better to try to destroy them (with shock ball, rocket launcher, flak and such)

LG "splash": Those are actually three small arcs that do half damage each. Each player can only get hit once by an LG shot, though.

So... is it possible to do a multi kill with LG in one shot?Never saw this happen..

[P]etya wrote:Cicada has less chance to evade from the AVRiL rocket than Raptor. And Cicada is a bigger, slower moving target. Besides you have to use that weapon correctly in order to shoot down the rockets.

Ok, I don't want to take this OT again, but briefly, what you say is not entirely correct. I direct you to Pegasus' comments on Cicada vs Raptor in the "Is the Falcon OP?" thread: